Obama-The-Terrorist Cover Boosts New Yorker Sales 80%

The New Yorker‘s controversial Barack Obama cover may have cost them a spot on the Presidential candidate’s plane, but with all of the extra copies of that issue Conde Nast is selling, they can upgrade their own plane. Early reports indicate that Obama’s “terrorist fist jab” cover produced an 80 per cent newsstand sales bump for the mag.

NY Post: THE controversial July 21 cover of The New Yorker portraying Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama as a Muslim has been a virtual sellout on newsstands.

In fact, the demand has completely overwhelmed Condé Nast’s ability to fill requests for additional copies.

The issue went off sale on Monday and preliminary estimates show single-copy sales surged 80 per cent over average weekly newsstand sales, or around 75,000 copies, compared with average newsstand sales of around 43,000.

Admittedly, The New Yorker gets the bulk of its weekly sales from subscriptions since its weekly rate-base promise to advertisers is to sell 1 million copies…

Despite the continuing uproar, New Yorker Editor-in-Chief David Remnick insisted it was not a stunt to sell extra copies of the magazine.

“There are easier and more predictable ways to raise newsstand sales than politics and satire,” said Remnick. “I’m more than interested in the economic health of the magazine, but I think The New Yorker has always sold copies and advertising because of the reputation for journalism and literary excellence over time – and not because of any single cover.”

Still the “economic health of the magazine” is GOOD.

Remnick then had to stop and ask what the question was again, since he was also mentally calculating how much money they were making from those additional sales. (Ok, we just made that up.)